The onus is on the radio access network to reduce electricity bills for telecom companies, and fortunately for operators, a group of researchers at UK universities have taken on the challenge – designing power amplifiers than can reduce some of the 80% of energy used by the RAN, so they claim. 5G promises to deliver far better energy consumption than previous generations, and in the nick of time, because traffic is starting to boom. By 2025, there is set to be 100 billion connections, including 40 billion smart devices according to the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN). Key to that energy reduction is the radio access network (RAN), which consumes the largest portion of energy across the network, at nearly…